Storage solutions manufacturer West Digital recently announced that it has developed a new formatting technique for HDs, designed to offer greater capacity through better utilization of the physical space existing in current products. She simply known as Advanced Format (in Portuguese, "Advanced Format") and seeks to reduce the amount of physical space needed to store information, through a better association of it.
Hard drives formatted with this new technique have minimum storage sectors of up to 4KB, much larger than those of products currently prepared for use with Macs or PCs. It employs some more demanding requirements with a much larger block of error correction, but In general, hard drives can have capacity gains of up to 11% through it, which would be enough to bypass the “math” used by manufacturers for a long time.
By formatting + clean installation of the operating system (if necessary), current hard drives can take advantage of the new technology from WD, but it will be easier for it to become popular in new storage solutions. The company promises to introduce products based on this new technique within a few weeks, and they are fully compatible with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems (in this case, only Vista or higher).
(via Electronist)
